Manna and Coffee

“God doesn’t want us to live out of anything less than the joy of the Lord!!!” – Tom Miyakawa

The past few weeks have been especially amazing in my walk with the Lord. God has opened doors and moved mountains, and I am excited to write about it, but not today.

Today I want to talk about one of my dear friends Tom Miyakawa. Tom and I met at Eli Lilly and Company over thirty years ago and we worked together on several projects. Tom is a statistician, and one of the smartest guys I’ve had the privilege to work with, but that is not what stands out about him. What stands out about Tom is the joy that he exudes out of his life when you are lucky enough to hang out with him.

Tom worked at Lilly for 20 years and then read John Piper’s book Don’t Waste Your Life and everything changed for him and his wife. Although the Miyakawa’s had everything in life that you could ever ask for, a good job, healthy children, a church family who loved them, they had been feeling restless and believed that God was going to call them into full time ministry at some point in their lives.

That call did come, and the Miyakawa family packed up their belongings and went to Thailand to minister to the hill tribe people, and whoever else needed encouragement and an invitation to follow Jesus. One of my other new friends, Ryan Stowell, still lives in Thailand and is the director of Seed of Hope. Ryan recently told me that Tom would do anything to bring joy into people’s lives, and to share the Good News of Jesus, while he was in Thailand. This even included, “delivering burritos in random rural villages in the middle of the night!”

You can listen to Tom’s story in this podcast in his own words. Trust me, it won’t be a waste of your life.

So what did Piper say in his book that ended up being the last straw to move the Miyakawa family from Indiana to Thailand? You will have to ask Tom, but here are a few quotes from Piper’s book, Don’t Waste Your Life, that may give us a few hints;

“I am wired by nature to love the same toys that the world loves. I start to fit in. I start to love what others love. I start to call earth “home.” Before you know it, I am calling luxeries “needs” and using my money just the way unbelievers do. I begin to forget the war. I don’t think much about people perishing. Missions and unreached people drop out of my mind. I stop dreaming about the triumphs of grace. I sink into a secular mind-set that looks first to what man can do, not what God can do. It is a terrible sickness. And I thank God for those who have forced me again and again toward a wartime mind-set.”

“Desire that your life count for something great! Long for your life to have eternal significance. Want this! Don’t coast through life without a passion.” 

“The really wonderful moments of joy in this world are not the moments of self-satisfaction, but self-forgetfulness. Standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon and contemplating your own greatness is pathological. At such moments we are made for a magnificent joy that comes from outside ourselves.” 

“He is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him.” 

“America is the first culture in jeopardy of amusing itself to death.” 

“You don’t have to know a lot of things for your life to make a lasting difference in the world. But you do have to know the few great things that matter, perhaps just one, and then be willing to live for them and die for them. The people that make a durable difference in the world are not the people who have mastered many things, but who have been mastered by one great thing.” 

“I will not waste my life! I will finish my course and finish it well. I will display the Gospel of the grace of God in all I do. I will run my race to the end.” – Paul” 

There were many more incredible quotes from this powerful book that I could have used above, but it would probably be better if you actually read the book for yourself. I think what Piper is trying to tell us that if you want to experience true joy, we have to be willing to love comfort less and love Christ more. We need to be willing to die before we can really live. We have to be willing to suffer and experience periods of stress and unhappiness if we want to experience true joy. 

Tom documented their time in Thailand in short videos, in which Tom rides a skateboard around Thailand while eating bugs, dodging elephant dung, and experiencing the joy of his freedom in Christ. You can watch one of Tom’s Miya Minute videos here and if you want more you can find other videos at vimeo.

I hesitated to write this manna about Tom this morning, because truth be told, I didn’t even ask him if I could do it. This manna is not about Tom though. It’s about Jesus shining though Tom. It’s about the Miyakawa family’s willingness to not waste their life and to embrace their true purpose in Christ. The joy that you see so apparent in these videos is simply Jesus shining through Tom’s life. Tom loves Jesus more than anything else in life, as do I, and I think that I can speak for both of us to say that the first step towards a joy-filled life is to admit that you are wasting your life apart from Jesus.

How do you do this? Simply ask God to forgive you for your sins. Tell Jesus that you believe that He died for your sins and that He rose from the dead and ascended back into Heaven to conquer death. Ask God to fill you with His Holy Spirit so that you will have the power to stop wasting your life and to live for Him. Ask God to help you to stop being controlled by fleshly desires, and instead to be controlled by His desires for your life. Ask the Holy Spirit for the wisdom and courage to boldly love everyone who is in your path today, whether they are easy to love or not. Ask Him to fill you with so much joy that you can understand what Tom experiences every day. Trust me, you won’t be sorry.